Scenes of Erasure – Part II: Remains

Scenes of Erasure brings together six contemporary shorts in which archaeological ruins and relics figure as dense sites for excavating histories and processes of political violence, imperial domination, and cultural erasure. This programme coincides with the exhibition of Hrair Sarkissian’s Stolen Past at Ibraaz London, in which the artist employs an adapted lithophane printing technique to create 3D renderings of mobile phone images of looted artefacts from the Raqqa Museum in Northern Syria. As with Stolen Past, the films featured in this programme use archaeological artefacts to explore the contested geopolitical landscapes in which they are embedded, attending to the systems, technologies, practices, and individuals that enable the destruction, appropriation, trafficking, recovery, and safeguarding of material heritage.

The Digger documents the daily routines of caretaker and workman Sultan Zeib Khan, who keeps watch over the 5,000-year-old Neolithic necropolis of Jebel al-Buhais and the tombs of Mleiha and Jebel Hafeet in Sharjah and Abu Dhabi. Khan, a migrant from Pakistan who has looked after these ruins for 20 years, also excavates funerary relics and transfers them to a nearby Sharjah Archaeological Museum where they experience another kind of entombment. Shot against the majestic desert landscape and in among the empty ancient tombs, the film portrays Khan’s solitary work as a form of labour that transcends simple maintenance and museological practices of conservation. Operating as a mediator between the living and the dead, Khan’s ritualistic and reparative labours suggest a sacred act of stewardship and remembrance.

In 2014, 45 crates of looted antiquities were discovered at the Geneva Freeport in a warehouse belonging to the disgraced antiquities dealer Robin Symes. Three of the crates, containing a series of funerary vases that were clandestinely excavated from 2500-year-old tombs in Southern Italy, were sent to forensic archaeologists Dr Christos Tsirogiannis and Dr Vinnie Norskov to investigate. An Excavation documents Tsirogiannis and Norskov as they attempt to reconstruct the missing links in the trafficking chain: from looters and smugglers to dealers, restorers, and auction houses. In addition to mapping the illicit networks of the international antiquities market, Tsirogiannis and Norskov endeavour to piece together the incomplete fragments of one of the looted vases as well as the archaeological contexts from which it was irremediably separated.

Part of Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s multimedia project Unconformities, Palimpsests records the process of extracting drilling core samples from several construction sites across Beirut. With the guidance of archaeologist Hadi Choueri, the artists disclose how these samples index the hidden layers of sedimented pasts buried just beneath our feet. The mixing of drone footage and microscopic images pulls us, vertiginously, from the immediacy of the urban present into the depths of the Earth’s history and its stratified records of human and geological events. The urban fabric of Beirut is presented as a giant palimpsest, a city where centuries of history are continuously overwritten, destroyed, and rebuilt, blending different epochs together.